Surviving Death Road

A quick catch up.

I survived Death Road!
So called for the numerous folk who have sadly lost their lives on this crazy perilous piece of gravel cut into some cliffs, high up and around 2 hours outside of La Paz, Death Road was until relatively recently the main road up towards Coroico and is still around 6km shorter than the new road, prompting locals to occasionally take some interesting risks with their lives.
The road itself was cut out of the rock by prisoners over the course of some 20 years. A not unremarkable feat given its location. The route begins at around 4650 metres and descends to 1200, taking in 69km or hairpin bends around crazy cliffs, hundreds of metres vertical drops to one side and sections barely 3m wide and of course, there are no rails lining this incredible creation. If a person is reckless enough to go too near the edge, well, game over.
This previously being the only route, locals would take huge trucks, vans, even coaches up, often driving for over 18 hours with no sleep to reach their destination, resulting obviously quite often in calamaties, one of the more tragic of these being the plummet to the bottom of the ravine of a coach containing around 100 people. Yikes!

Luckily, because there is a new (and much safer)road now in place, trucks and vehicles in general are a much rarer sight on the Death Road, though there is the occasional loco local who will attempt it! Mostly the only people who now use this road are tourists on mountain bikes. And that´s just what I did.

Setting off early doors, we arrived at the track head at around 8:30am in the shivering cold of 4650 high amid snow-capped peaks and wrapped in layers of fleeces, scarves and gloves. There were 2 others in my party; an English girl Lizzie, who I´d arranged to do the tour with, and a Chilean named Pablo as well as our guide.
We tried out our bikes, and tentatively tested the brakes, the most important part of the bike for this excersise! A few minutes later we were up on the first part of the road - a luxury section with only slightly pot-holed tarmac, nice and wide and with occasional barriers between us and the short way down. It did involve the careful overtaking of huge lorries driven in the usual (read ´insane´) Bolivian style, but was generally alright. The views, when I dared look up from scouting pot holes and broken bits of tarmac, was amazing. Snowy mountains rising up above the clouds and morning mistiness and the treeline poking through far below.
I tried to keep up as best as possible with our guide as it was really cold and I was longing to get the feeling back into my fingers.
I didn´t have long to endure, because the descent is incredibly rapid and by the beginning of the Death Road proper we were stripping off sweaty fleeces ready to enter the sub-tropical region only a few hundred metres lower.

To be continued....